Wednesday, June 14, 2017

When I glanced down at the carrier bags and saw the two gigantic volumes of score, I realised the chap next to me on the Glyndebourne bus was none other than the composer of Hamlet, Brett Dean. "Why Hamlet?" I asked. He grinned: "Why not?"

Hamlet should be a gift for any composer - glorious soliloquies, poetry known to the entire land if not the whole world, a story of bottomless depth and endless possibilities for reinterpretation. It's not as if nobody has set it before: if I remember right, there are around 14 earlier versions, with Ambroise Thomas's effort the best known (though as Saint-Saëns said, "There is good music, bad music and the music of Ambroise Thomas...") Brett Dean's humongous new work for Glyndebourne, though, seems set to shred all competition into musical flotsam and jetsam.

One thing you cannot do if you're turning a play like Hamlet into music is treat it with kid gloves. Dean and his librettist, the distinguished Canadian director Matthew Jocelyn, haven't. They have used only about a fifth of the actual play: Jocelyn has taken it to bits, reassembled it, restructured, redepicted, redreamed. After all, it takes, on average, about three times as long to sing a word as to speak it, so if you set every last line of Hamlet you'd end up with about 15 hours of opera. It would be possible to do it in other ways, retaining more of the poetic monologues which here are often boiled down to a mere handful of lines. But then something else would have to give; one might lose the grand sweep of the dramatic total, the ensemble work, the sonic colour with its imaginative flair.

Although you may find your favourite moments are missing ("Alas, poor Yorick" is in, but "To thine own self be true" is not) the work is masterfully structured. The impression, musically, is rather like a giant symphony of Mahlerian proportions plus some; dramatically it is full of different levels, new insights, magnificent company challenges and a vivid variety of pace and richly explored possibilities.

Symphonic Shakespeare

Allan Clayton as Hamlet
Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

The opera's scenes seem to correspond roughly to the movements of a symphonic work in which the intensity rarely lets up. First, an opening dramatic exposition with slow introduction - Hamlet mourns his father at the graveside before we plunge into Gertude and Claudius's wedding party, at which the prince is drunk and disruptive; and the arrival of the Ghost, all the more chilling for the tenderness between Hamlet and his dead father.

The second main section opens almost as a scherzo, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern played by two skittish countertenors, and culminates in the play-within-a-play - lavishly decorated with a totally brilliant onstage accordionist plus deconstructed lines from Hamlet's soliloquy that pop in as self-referential touchstones. The 1hr 45min first act closes with the desperate confrontation between Hamlet and Gertrude and the murder of Polonius - a great central climax that leaves Gertrude psychologically eviscerated. We all need the long interval to get our breath back.

Next we turn to Ophelia's madness, death and funeral - an eerie slow movement, full of startling writing that includes a good proportion of the work's best and most interesting music. The dramatic pacing is notable here, building up to an absolute cataclysm as Hamlet cries "I loved Ophelia"; similarly cathartic is the multifaceted finale, with the sword fight and multiple murders that nevertheless retains Horatio's determination, as the match is agreed, to up Hamlet's quota of prize horses to 11. The rest is...silence.

The opera has been planned with Glyndebourne's auditorium in mind. A group of singers take their places in the orchestra pit - and sometimes in the balcony - being used, effectively, as instruments. Indeed, almost everywhere you look there are people singing, thumping instruments or doing strange things with unusual percussive gadgets... The LPO tweeted this image from the score:

Electronics are subtly woven in, whether using sampled (apparently pre-recorded) extracts of the singers' lines or setting up atmospheric rumbles and roars. Even the more conventional aspects of the instrumentation are clever, clear, often ingenious; for instance, the countertenors of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are aurally shadowed by two clarinets almost trying to edge one another out of the way. As for the designs, Ralph Myers places the action in a Nordic Noir type of design featuring shiftable Scandic white walls with huge windows; Alice Babidge's costumes are contemporary in style, which makes Claudius's crown look faintly ridiculous, but I suspect it's meant to be. Neil Armfield's direction is so organic a part of the work that it is hard to imagine it done in any other way.

To thine own self be true...

To say that it's a superhuman effort, and not only for the composer, is not saying enough. Dean and Jocelyn have risen to the challenge of transforming the play with fearless aplomb, and in so doing have created giant roles for their lead singers.

Allan Clayton's Hamlet may prove the ultimate making of this rising-star British tenor. He is on stage almost all the time; we rarely see anything from anyone else's point of view. A doomed, bearlike desperado, he travels from agonised grief through madness real or imagined and out the other side to the fury of his final (expertly performed) sword fight with David Butt Philip's Laertes. It's a huge sing for this often classically-oriented performer - we have loved his Mozart and Handel although, most recently, he was pushing the boat out further as David in Meistersinger - and he proves himself not only in glorious voice but a master of the stage in every way. For Barbara Hannigan's Ophelia, Dean has created ethereally high, dizzyingly complex arabesquing lines, offset by Sarah Connolly as a persuasive Gertrude, hard-edged in character but mellifluous and radiant of voice. Sir John Tomlinson is the Ghost, as well as the Lead Player and the Gravedigger - an intriguing alignment of the three figures - and owns those scenes with his outsize presence and sepulchral tone.

The chorus frames the action with plenty of impact, plunging into "Laertes shall be king" to launch the second half with maximum oomph. There's also a rewarding plethora of smaller roles, luxuriously cast: Rod Gilfrey as Claudius, Jacques Imbrailo as Horatio, Kim Begley as Polonius and Rupert Enticknap and Christopher Lowrey as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. As for Vladimir Jurowski's conducting, I doubt anyone else could have pulled this off even half so magnificently.

I am reliably informed that some of the stage blood found its way onto a first violin part in the orchestra pit. At least, I think it was stage blood. Pictured left...

Sunday, April 24, 2016

There was a lot of Shakespeare around yesterday - extravaganzas at the Globe, the Southbank, Stratford-upon-Avon live on TV (incidentally, if you were watching that you will have seen our fabulous novel-concert violinist partner, David Le Page, leading the Orchestra of the Swan behind all those great actors). I felt privileged to be able to make a small contribution to the celebrations, giving a pre-concert talk at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, where the young conductor Lahav Shani was at the helm for a programme of three different versions of Romeo and Juliet.

As a fun Long Read for Sunday, here's the text of my talk.

JD's Talk for the CBSO, 23 April 2016

Happy Shakespeare's Birthday! I think everyone has a Shakespeare concert tonight. There’s all manner of
readings and music in almost every venue I can think of. Everywhere we look,
people are celebrating his birthday and
marking the 400th anniversary of his death, and really, for an author who walked amongst
us so many centuries ago, this is simply amazing and wonderful.

And why not, when Shakespeare’s works are full to
bursting with music? It's not only in
the sound and flow of his language, which is full of the richness, the variety
and thecolour of music in its own
right. There are songs
in almost every play, serving many different
purposes –from Desdemona’s Willow Song in Othello,
which is a premonition of her own doom, to the high
spirits of It was a lover and his Lass in As You Like It and the pain of
unrequited love in Twelfth Night’s Come Away, Come Away Death. There are dances to
close, masques, balls and general fun to music in many of them. And there's music in the text, too:
Lorenzo and Jessica sit upon the moonlit grass to hear sweet music in The
Merchant of Venice and discuss how it moves them; Prospero’s Isle in The Tempest is
full of noises; and of course Orsino in Twelfth Night
starts the play with the line “If music be the food of love, play on”.

Shakespeare has inspired more composers than any other
single author, indeed probably more than anything extramusical except the
Bible: over 300 works, from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen right through to Thomas Ades’s opera The
Tempest. Let’s not forget how far Shakespeare travels in space as well as time. Ghosts of The Tempest haunt Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. In
Paris Berlioz was in thrall to Shakespeare; Mendelssohn was too, in Germany; and later Korngold in Vienna and Hollywood. Verdi in Italy wrote three magnificent Shakespearean operas, Macbeth, Otello
and Falstaff. And some of the greatest Shakespearean music comes from Russia
and is by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

The other day I was talking to a Russian conductor about the way Shakespeare has inspired composers. Growing up in Russia, he had got to know the plays in translation –notably from the fine
mid-20th-century versions by the poet Boris
Pasternak, the author of Dr Zhivago. Exploring the different translations
available, he had been interested to see the way every era coloured Shakespearein its own way. The 19th-century translations were, he
remarked, almost too beautiful. They played up the romanticism, smoothing out the earthy elements. He felt that it was only in the 20th-century that the translators really began to understand
the full scale and complexity and
variety in Shakespeare - the way the boundaries between what we
think of as his genres are blurred, for instance; the comedies are often
potentially tragedies that end well, and the tragedies offer plenty of comic
elements along the way.

So: Shakespeare in translation is filtered through a
mediator, and that mediator’s time and place, and what reaches the audience or the reader is therefore a personal vision, an interpretation. This sounds like something second-hand –yet if you think about it, that’s also how the
plays reach us in the theatre, through the interpretation of a director and
actors. The amazing thing about Shakespeare is that he can be reinvented time after time, and he’s so strong that he
always comes out on top.

If every translator filters Shakespeare through the style and preoccupations of his or her own day, so does every composer.
Translating Shakespeare into music is a huge challenge as well as an
inspiration, and every person will choose something different to respond to as
the creative cogs begin to whirr. Not only the time, place and personality of the composer are involved,
but also the purpose of that particular work.

Therefore what we have in tonight’s concert is incredibly varied, even though all three pieces are inspired by the
same story: Romeo and Juliet.

I'm sure you know
the story, but in case, let's recap quickly. The Montagus and the
Capulets, two distinguished families, are mortal enemies, though we never learn why (which is clever: Shakespeare doesn't let us take sides). They
kill each other in swordfights on the streets of Verona. Romeo is the Montagus' son. Juliet is the 14-year-old
daughter of the Capulets. Romeo and his friends Mercutio and Benvolio gatecrash
the Capulets’ball; there Romeo meets Juliet
and they fall in love. Later Romeo talks to her while she’s on her balcony and they
plan to go to Friar Lawrenceand get married in
secret. Friar Lawrence complies, hoping this will end
the traditional enmity. But immediately afterwards, Mercutio
and Juliet’s cousin Tybalt start fighting again. Romeo tries to stop them, but
Tybalt kills Mercutio, Mercutio blames Romeo for getting in the way and
proclaims "A plague on both your houses," as he dies. Romeo kills Tybalt. The
Duke of Verona banishes Romeo. He spends one night
with Juliet, then must leave. Friar Lawrence gives Juliet a potion that will make her appear dead. She will be
entombed in the family vault. He’ll summon Romeo, who’ll come back, she’ll wake up and they’ll run away together. But the message doesn’t reach Romeo –instead, he hears that Juliet is dead, and he goes to her tomb and takes poison. Juliet wakes to find him dead and stabs herself. Over their lifeless bodies, the families are reconciled
at last.

A portrait of Tchaikovsky (photo: Wikipedia)

It’s an eternal human story. It’s about crazy love and senseless hatred, about adolescence and the complexity of guiding young people, about friendship and loyalty, and nuances of
human emotion are explored on every single page. The theme of love goes through
it all –not only love between the star-crossed young
pair. Love of different types and degrees exists between the young friends,
between parents and children, between Juliet and her nurse,between Romeo and his teacher, Friar Lawrence, and even –especially in the ballet –between the implicitly youthful Lady Capulet and her nephew Tybalt.

We’re hearing three
versions tonight, by Tchaikovsky, Bernstein and Prokofiev, but there are absolutely heaps of others. Berlioz’s is part opera,
part incidental music, part oratorio. There’s an opera by Gounod –in which Juliette wakes up in time to sing a duet with Romeo before he
dies. The soundtrack of Zeffirelli's film of
the play is by Nino Rota and celebrated in its own right. There was even a fine
song by Dire Straits back in the 80s. And, less well known, the slow movement of
Beethoven’s first string quartet, Op.18 No.1, was
reputedly inspired by the tomb scene.

Each work from a different composer in a different era
transforms the play into something new and personal. Tchaikovsky, as a young
man in Moscow in 1869, produces a so-called Overture –though a tone-poem might be a
better description of it. Prokofiev, in soviet
Moscow in the
1930s and 40s, created a score specifically to
be danced, and found all manner of demands being placed on him to that end –of which more in a moment. And Leonard Bernstein in New
York in 1955, working with his dramatist Arthur Laurents, the lyricist Stephen
Sondheim and the choreographer Jerome Robbins, created in West Side Story
something more than a musical, a work for the people in which all the creative
team gave their very best work.

First, Tchaikovsky. It’s an early work, suggested to Tchaikovsky by the composer and frequent mentor to that generation of composers,
Balakirev. The premiere was a flop. Balakirev suggested changes, Tchaikovsky
more or less obeyed, and it was...still a flop. It wasn't until 1886 that a
final rethink by the now much more experienced composer provided it with its
title fantasy-overture and its splendid coda.

Tchaikovsky would have known the play from one of
those comparatively naïve, prettified translations. I think he must have identified deeply with
the notion of star-crossed love; it wasn’t easy to be gay in 19th-century
Russia and he suffered terrific internal struggles over this all his life. Perhaps an identification with the subject matter might
enhance the work's intensity, but actually I suspect that this work's runaway success in our times is 99 per cent down to sheer
hard graft. He finds in Romeo and Juliet’s story an almost classic Sonata form, with a
substantial introduction and that coda. The whole notion of
sonata form is conflict –and likewise with drama.
In the standard pattern of sonata form, two principal themes contrast with one
another, aided and abetted by a few others, and their potential is selectively explored in a central episode known as the Development. Tchaikovsky
creates these two themes in, first of all, pugnacious fighting music that
represents the enmity of the Montagues and the Capulets, and secondly the gorgeous melody that represents the lovers. The wealth of detail is amazing:
listen out for the irregular accents in the fighting music which could almost depict clashing swords, and in the love music the glimmers of harp which could
suggest the glint of moonlight. The development centres on the music of
conflict and rather than mingling it with the love theme, Tchaikovsky brings in
the other important musical idea: the one we hear at the very beginning; it feels as if it could have been modelled on the unaccompanied choirs
of the Russian orthodox church.

This theme
represents Friar Lawrence and his attempts to calm the conflict by bringing Romeo
and Juliet together. It provides the introduction, the coda and some of the middle too, sounding strongly through the fighting in the development, as if reminding us of the context in which Romeo kills Tybalt. The coda begins
with a funeral march and as the work comes to its close the chorale, smoothing
things, extrapolating good from tragedy, gives way to the love theme turned
more or less upside down and the final chords are from the fight theme, in
reconciliation. In short, Tchaikovsky takes the very essence of the
story, turns it into pure musical
structure and
imbues it with his own time and place firstly with his intense romanticsm and also by bringing in the Russian orthodox flavour,
which you wouldn’t have found in 15th-century Verona or Stratford upon Avon.

Nor would you have found much of it in Stalin’s Russia. In
1935, Prokofiev was living safely abroad. Stalin, it seems, was eager to lure
him back to Moscow, and Prokofiev was not so difficult to lure.
He liked the idea of writing accessible, enjoyable music that could be
appreciated by a wide audience, he felt out of step with the avant-garde
contemporary music of Europe, notably
serialism, and the rise of the Nazis was doing nothing
to encourage him to stay in the west. Offered the
tempting bait of creating a ballet of Romeo and Juliet for the great Bolshoi, he took it. He returned to
live in Russia and began work on a scenario with the dramatist Sergei Radlov. They
reformatted the story on quasi-revolutionary lines, concentrating on the
struggle between generations more than the family rivalry. Quite incredibly,
they planned a happy ending! Prokofiev even wrote it. It was unearthed and performed about eight years ago and apparently it contained a lot of C major chords.

But in 1936 everything
changed: Stalin’s purges were
reaching their height, and the chairman of the newly created Committee on Arts Affairs, which
enforced Soviet ideology, dissolved the entire administration of the Bolshoi. Romeo and Juliet was postponed, then shelved. Next, it was agreed that it
would be performed at the Kirovin St Petersburg in 1940. Then: more trouble. The choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky wanted more dances in order to show off his company and Prokofiev was forced
to rewrite and rejig swathes of it, creating
plenty of short showpiece numbers, making the orchestration denser to sound more ‘socialist realist’and restoring the original tragic ending, apparently on Stalin’s demand. Which is
perhaps surprising coming from Stalin. It was finally performed at the Bolshoi
in 1946, with the specific aim of sending Churchill a signal about Russia’s cultural involvement with Britain and its Immortal
Bard. Ironic that such a masterpiece as this is actually not what Prokofiev
had envisioned at all.

But that is our
gain, because Prokofiev, creating an entire ballet, could explore the aspects
Tchaikovsky's short piece could not: there are bustling street scenes,
full of life and humour; there’s Juliet’s nurse, with whom Romeo and his friends flirt fabulously; there are masses of dances, dances at the ball, dances for the townsfolk, dances for Juliet’s friends.
Prokofiev might not have wanted to create them, butthey’re wonderful and really true to Shakespeare’s spirit, adding verve, humour, life-force, and character too. There’s a particularly
delightful moment which if you see the choreographer Kenneth Macmillan’s version with
the Royal ballet, he gives to Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio, in which they disguise themselves with much glee
before going in to the ball. You feel their youth, their energy, their earthy
humour and Romeo’s premonition that something extraordinary is about to happen.

The
balcony scene is heavenly –of course, this being a
ballet, Juliet doesn’t stay on her balcony very long, coming down to dance a pas de deux with Romeo instead. But Prokofiev, for all his glorious
melodies, never slips towards the sentimental –even at its most
tender there’s a dark undertone to this music and his personal harmonic language gives it a subtle, unstable and slightly astringent soundworld,
typical of Prokofiev.

We have Balakirev to thank for Tchaikovsky's score, and a choreographer to thank for Prokofiev's. And we have
another choreographer to thank for conceiving the idea that became West Side Story. It was Jerome Robbins, who suggested to
Leonard Bernstein writing a musical based on Romeo and Juliet. Originally it was going to be East
Side Story and the warring families were to have been respectively Catholic and Jewish. First mooted in 1949, it didn’t get off the ground. But
the creative team –Bernstein, Robbins, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim –reconvened in 1955 to try again, discussing what was then called
juvenile delinquency. They explored the idea of the gang replacing the family –young people joining violent gangs as a way of belonging to something –a scenario that's still very much with us
now.

The scene moved to the Upper West Side, and the gangs became self-styled Americans on the one hand –the Jets, in which our hero Tony has been mixed up –versus the Puerto Rican immigrants of the Sharks, led by Bernardo, whose sister is our heroine, Maria. Of course, the twist is that the Americans who are
warring against the immigrant Puerto Ricans are themselves the children of
immigrants.

The creative team ditched the less
plausible elements of Shakespeare, like the sleeping potion –and Maria does not die. Instead she delivers a powerful speech over Tony’s body; she takes
a gun and declares that she, too, can kill now because she has learned
how to hate. It’s a devastating moment, because it demonstrates so clearly how these
cycles of violence are self-perpetuating.

Here’s a wonderful description by Laurents of the creative team's aims: “We all knew what we did not want. Neither formal poetry nor flat
reportage; neither opera nor split-level musical comedy numbers; neither
zippered-in ballets nor characterless dance routines. We didn't want newsreel
acting, blue-jean costumes or garbage can scenery any more than we wanted
soapbox pounding for our theme of young love destroyed by a violent world of
prejudice. What we did want was to aim at a lyrically and theatrically
sharpened illusion of reality…”

Musically, the scenario provided Bernstein
with some choice material. The Puerto Rican aspect meant he could get
his teeth into Latin American music in a big way –its rhythms
permeate the song ‘America’and the dance scene at
the Gym, which we hear as the Symphonic Dances, with the famous Mambo. The Jets
are represented at first by jazzy rhythms, finger-clicking, a cat-like prowling
in the shadows. And the songs range from the anthem Somewhere to a brilliant
bit of satirical comedy in Gee, Officer Krupky, when the Jets joke about
telling the policeman that they’re good underneath and it’s their circumstances that have made them delinquents –one of them says “I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!” Set bang on in its
creators' own era and city, its verve, poetry, earthiness, raw passion and
violence is actually incredibly true to the spirit of Shakespeare's original.

It’s fascinating to see that now West Side Story
is undergoing a metamorphosis. It's starting to cross in
earnest from the Broadway theatre to the opera house. I’m off to Salzburg
in a few weeks’time to see Cecilia Bartoli as Maria. AndI think it’s going to be done at
Glyndebourne. I think that's great. This top quality work
deserves that top quality treatment.

One last thought. I think the question of filters –such as a translator’s Shakespeare, a composer’s Shakespeare, teamwork Shakespeare –is pertinent in many areas. What we see in the media, from Facebook to the national news, is always someone’s interpretation. We have
to remember that what we take as information from other people is rarely pure fact. There’s a filter of time, place and perspective on almost everything. Take that home and have a think. And enjoy theconcert. Thank you very much.

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I write words for, with and about music. My work has appeared in The Independent, The JC, The Guardian, The Sunday Times and numerous music magazines and I'm the author of novels, biographies and stage works. Libretto for 'Silver Birch', Roxanna Panufnik's opera for Garsington 2017, was described as 'powerful and poetic' by The Times. Latest novel 'Ghost Variations' (Unbound). Currently crowdfunding 'Meeting Odette', a 21st-century fairytale.
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